1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method, computer system, computer program product and graphical interface for generating and displaying an information catalog based on combining technical metadata, business metadata, and presentation metadata.
2. Related Art
A decision support system exists to provide the tools and facilities to manage and deliver complete, timely, accurate, and understandable business information to authorized individuals for effective business decision making.
Data is reaching an all time high in being a critical asset for a business and within a decision support system. The data is distributed throughout multiple systems on multiple platforms and environments. In today's complex, distributed computer systems, data abounds but is often hard to come by. The data is scattered, protected with different levels of granularity by its owners, and the access capabilities, if available, differ from system to system. Data in one system often has no consistency with data on another in definition, format, and/or timeliness. This makes it difficult to combine or compare data from heterogeneous sources. In many cases, the same data exists in different data stores across multiple applications. This leads to even more problems because the question of which system has the “real” data for a piece of business information cannot be easily answered.
Data warehouses in the form of relational database systems address these problems and gather, enrich, and cleanses all this disparate data into a single, consistent source to maximize the value of a company's data assets. These analytically oriented systems can potentially improve a company's ability to rediscover and utilize information they already own and derive insight from the wealth of data available, delivering information that's conclusive, fact-based, and actionable.
Unfortunately, current decision support systems for understanding business issues and making business decisions are not adequately supported by existing data warehouses for several reasons. One reason is that the data warehouses do not include information as to how the data is used in computer applications (i.e., software) which support business processes. Another reason is that the data in a complex relational database system having a large number of relational tables is not conveniently accessible to the business-oriented end user (e.g., business manager). The data warehouse may have a system catalog containing metadata that provides information about the data in the data warehouse at a granular level. However, using the system catalog is cumbersome and difficult, since the system catalog is not intended for the business-oriented end user, but rather is intended for the system administrator.
Accordingly, there is need for a method, computer system, computer program product and graphical interface which enable business-oriented end users to more readily utilize available data in decision support systems.